In this HealthSounds episode, Pam Rush,
cardiovascular clinical service line program director at Allina Health, shares how MHI leveraged over 80 different data sources fed into its Enterprise Data Warehouse to identify gaps in care, clinical variations and quality improvement opportunities.

During Predictive Healthcare Analytics: Four Pillars for Success, a March 2018 webcast now available for rebroadcast, Ms. Rush, along with Dr. Steven Bradley, cardiologist, MHI and associate director, MHI Healthcare Delivery Innovation Center, share their organization’s four pillars of predictive analytics success…addressing population health issues, reducing clinical variation, testing new processes and leveraging this enterprise data warehouse.

The webinar provided details on creating a culture of quality and innovation, building dashboards, as well as several case examples of quality improvement initiatives contributing to these savings and much more.

With a successful history in reducing readmissions and improving patient outcomes for congestive heart failure through its remote patient monitoring program, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is expanding its program to additional disease states and developing systems to ensure continued success.

The webinar provided UPMC’s key factors for future success in remote patient monitoring, the impact the program has had on UPMC’s clinical outcomes as well as details on the remote patient monitoring clinical development process, clinical pathways and graduation protocols and much more.

How do you identify patients for telehealth services? In the case of Essentia Health, which conducts an average of 5,000 telehealth visits annually and whose largely rural footprint touches three states, the telehealth service may dictate selection.

In this HealthSounds episode, Maureen Ideker, RN, BSN, MBA, Essentia Health’s senior advisor for telehealth, defines a set of scenarios her organization uses to match patients to its half dozen tele-hospital based telehealth services and more than 20 tele-clinic programs.

The webinar provided key details on engaging providers in telehealth; staffing and equipment requirements; clinic ROI from telehealth; rundown of tele-hospital and tele-clinic services; telehealth innovation stories moving the needle on financial, clinical and quality metrics such as readmissions and patient no-show rates; using telehealth to tackle the opioid addiction crisis; and much more.

While shared savings could be several years in the future for fledgling accountable care organizations, there are shortcuts for physician practices in ACOs to generate population health revenue immediately, explains Tim Gronniger, senior vice president of development and strategy for Caravan Health.

The webinar provided key details on the key cornerstones of Caravan Health’s ACO success, including staffing and patient engagement secrets; payoffs from detailed MACRA and MIPS reporting; the benefits of effort-based quality metrics over outcomes-based data; two critical 2018 strategies Caravan Health’s ACOs use to build on their success, and much more.

As 2017 draws to a close, the recent CVS Health-Aetna merger continues to dominate the healthcare conversation. David Buchanan, president, Buchanan Strategies, weighed in on the non-traditional partnership during Trends Shaping the Healthcare Industry in 2018: A Strategic Planning Session, a December 2017 webinar now available for replay.

In this HealthSounds episode, Buchanan predicts the future of mega mergers in healthcare, the impact of the CVS-Aetna alliance on brand awareness, and the real ‘bonanza’ of the $69 billion partnership beyond bringing healthcare closer to home for many consumers.

As patients of Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) began to utilize the features of its newly minted portal, LVHN and its physician providers soon recognized the added benefits of this interactive tool.

In this HealthSounds episode, LVHN’s Lindsay Altimare outlines seven ways the LVHN portal, the fastest growing portal on the Epic® platform, improves efficiency and quality for her organization.

The webinar provided key details on promotion strategies for portal launch, four LVHN portal platforms that allow patients to initiate self-service and their impact on physician practice workflow, LVHN metrics to measure patient engagement and portal success, new portal features slated to launch this year, and much more.

How do you engage community residents in their health when many are distrustful of and feel disrespected by the healthcare system?

Encourage them to both direct and participate in the initiative, advises Charmaine Ruddock, project director of Bronx Health REACH.

In this HealthSounds episode, Ms. Ruddock shares what Bronx Health REACH learned early on in its coalition-building from community focus groups, and how this local feedback informed program development for a community traditionally ranked last in New York in terms of health outcomes and health factors.

During Innovative Community-Clinical Partnerships: Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities through Community Transformation, a November 2017 webinar now available for replay, Ms. Ruddock shares the unique partnerships forged by Bronx Health REACH with area faith-based programs, bodegas, restaurants, schools, clinics and art groups and how these partnerships promote the health and well-being of area residents. Program highlights include partnering with the American Bodega Association and bodega suppliers to increase healthy purchase options; engaging clinics and patients in a Vegetable and Fruit Rx program to encourage healthy eating in obese patients; encouraging teachers to add nutrition education to their curriculum; promoting healthy eating options at Bronx restaurants via ‘The Bronx Salad;’ facilitating discounts for SNAP beneficiaries for healthy items.

How can care teams encourage patients to open up about sensitive social determinant of health (SDOH) factors? By employing motivational interviewing to establish a respectful partnership, advises Cindy Buckels, TAV Health director of population health.

In this HealthSounds episode, Ms. Buckels explains why motivational interviewing is more effective than the usual “Chunk-Check-Change” approach in transforming patient ambivalence and effecting the kind of behavior change that improves health.

How receptive are clinicians to being coached in patient engagement techniques? At PinnacleHealth, provider reaction to rollout of patient engagement coaching has followed a standard bell curve, notes Kathryn Shradley, PinnacleHealth’s director of population health.

In this HealthSounds episode, Ms. Shradley outlines the framework underscoring the engagement coach’s supportive and educational role while at providers’ elbows as well as ways the health system earned clinicians’ support for the initiative.

During A Two-Pronged Patient Engagement Strategy: Closing Gaps in Care and Coaching Clinicians, an August 2017 webinar now available for replay, Ms. Shradley describes her organization’s two-pronged approach to increase engagement rates across the health system, including details on the key patient survey data that helped to shape this program, three ways PinnacleHealth works to engage its more resistant patients, and more details on the essential role of the engagement coach for clinicians.

For patients with cancer, palliative care should begin at diagnosis to help them shoulder the disease’s emotional, physical and financial burdens, explains Laura Ostrowsky, director of case management at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). However, for multiple reasons, referrals to hospice frequently happen too late for MSKCC patients to derive full benefit from that service.

In this episode of HealthSounds, Ms. Ostrowsky shares some key questions for integrated case managers to ask providers to improve timeliness of hospice referrals, patient and family satisfaction with hospice service, and awareness of end-of-life care. The strategy is one way MSKCC uses integrated case management to validate its worth in a value-based system: providing the best care in a quality-effective manner.